The January, 1959 issue of the Princeton Seminary Bulletin carries an important article by President John A. Mackay. The title of the article is "Theological Triennium: for What?”
In this article Dr. Mackay speaks of his coming retirement and in that connection of some of the men who have infiuenced him in the past. First he mentions the “philosophical Gamaliel, J.B. Baillie, a great Hegelian” and adds that he did not agree with Baillie's main ideas (p. 6). Then he speaks of the debt he owes "to that supremely great teacher, Benjamin B. Warfield. 'Bennie' Warfield opened up to us the Reformed System.”
Mackay does not say that he did not agree with the ideas of Warfield as he disagreed with those of Baillie. In fact from this article one gets the opposite impression. But from several books written by Mackay we know that he is at most a very “remarkable" follower of the theology of Warfield.
Mackay has used a "deleted Bible” and taught from it a "diluted gospel” for these many years. The Bible is not for Mackay, as it was for Warfield, a standard of objective truth. "There is no such criterion where the human realm is dealt with, or any realm which is directly related to our ultimate sense of values” (“The Gospel and our Generation” in The Christian Message for the World Today, Round Table Press, 1934, p. 96).
It is only when he has first rejected the Bible as the infallible Word of God, the way Warfield took it, that Mackay can write a “lyrical interlude on Biblical authority." For then he also drops the "grand particularities of the gospel" for which Warfield stood and speaks of the general destiny of man, which is to partake in the divine order, the order of the resurrection.
To a horizontally minded generation of men Mackay has taught his many students to say: "Look up, sheer along the line of the vertical. Let the eternal in" (Idem p. 123). Men must be called upon to join "the brotherhood of enthusiasm" that has found the "dimension of depth” in their lives. This is Mackay's gospel. It was not that of Warfield.
It is obvious that Mackay's dimensionalist philosophy owes most to the third teacher that he mentions, namely, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno was a mystic. He did not interpret the life of man in the light of the God and the Christ of the Bible. His gospel was the gospel of non-Christian mysticism, which is the gradual absorption of man into the life of God. That is a non-Christian dimensional philosophy.
It is a dimensional philosophy that Mackay has introduced into Princeton Theological Seminary as a replacement for the theology of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield.